Households &families

Men and women in Germany tend to have children at increasingly later ages. However, this does not mean that there is a general downward trend in family formation. Based on a comparison of aggregated birth cohorts, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reports that at the beginning of their forties most women still live in families as mothers.

Older people aged 65 years or more who live in private households usually do so together with a partner. To mark the International Day of Older Persons on 1 October, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reports that roughly 62% of the people aged 65 or over were living in a partnership in 2016. Another 4.5% lived in a joint household with other people, but without a partner. The proportion of older people living alone was 33.5%.

In 2016, more young people aged 15 to 24 who lived as unmarried children in their parents' household participated in education compared with 20 years ago. Microcensus results show that 84% of the young people attended a school or higher education institution last year, while their number was by 10 percentage points lower in 1996 (74%).

In FOCUS / 2015-02-23

Couples in Germany: partners of similar age are preferred

In statistical terms, relationships with a big age difference are relatively rare in Germany. In 2014, the proportion of couples with an age difference of ten or more years was just 8%. This proportion was slightly higher for unmarried couples (11%) than for married couples (8%).

In most cases, there was only a small age difference between the two partners. Nearly half of the couples (47%) had an age gap of between one and three years. At the time of the survey, the partners were of the same age in one in ten couples (10%).

Regardless of the actual difference in age, the most common age distribution is the 'traditional' one where the man is older than the woman. In 2014, this applied to roughly three quarters of all couples (73%), while the reverse was true for just 17%. Among unmarried couples, a significantly higher proportion of the women (24%) was older than the men as compared with married couples (16%).